


May Your Heart Lead You On

by dynamicsymmetry



Series: Footage Not Found [21]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Bonding, F/M, Male-Female Friendship, Missing Scene, Season/Series 02, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-24 21:24:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12021285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: As Beth recovers from her suicide attempt, she feels the walls closing in - and escapes into the strange company of the most unlikely person.





	May Your Heart Lead You On

**Author's Note:**

> Per the tag, this was originally [yet another Tumblr prompt](http://dynamicsymmetry.tumblr.com/post/164532722081/shit-katie-literally-asked-the-same-thing-and-i) (special thanks to Mollie). I hardly ever write stuff set in season 2 - I'm not sure quite why, it's just not a thing I do - so it was fun to get the two prompts that pushed me in this direction. Got to stretch myself a bit, and also write Daryl and Beth simply being friends, which I love. 
> 
> I tagged this with the ship because that's what it is in my head, but there's absolutely nothing here that necessarily says romance. So take it in whatever direction you want in _your_ head. 
> 
> When I was casting around for a title, I thought of [one of my favorite James songs,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZTCt-nQY9U) which as it turns out might lyrically be about this dang thing. which is fun.
> 
> ❤️

  

> _These wounds are all self-imposed_  
>  _Life’s no disaster_  
>  _All roads lead onto death row_  
>  _Who knows what’s after_  
> 
> \- James, "Waltzing Along"

 

Beth has only ever truly been sick once in her life.

Little things, sure. Chicken pox the one time, that great storied rite of childhood - she itched and griped about it and got to stay home from school, and then she was over it. Flu, colds, stomach bugs, all the usual minor stuff she always figured everyone went through as part of being a living human being with a normally functioning immune system. She’s no stranger to illness but she also never viewed illness - in her own personal bodily experience - as anything other than a periodic nuisance.

But then there was the spring she was seven, and a different kind of flu hit her like a hammer to the center of her cells, and she never had a cough that bad, never knew coughs that bad could _happen,_ and every single muscle in her body aching like she had taken a long series of tumbles out of the climbing tree at the top of the hill, and the fever was a terrible shivering fog that rolled in and blotted out the world. She remembers being in bed, drifting deeper and deeper, then being lowered into water she somehow knew was merely cool but which felt like the heart of a frozen lake. Mama’s voice, near and worried as she spoke into the phone.

In the end she didn’t have to go to the hospital. But she knows she was close.

What she recalls most clearly is the recovery. She remembers getting well. She remembers that it hurt and it was so profoundly frustrating; whereas once before a day or two home from school was a luxury, now it was tiresome, watching everyone else come and go like normal, voices and the lowing of the cows and nickers of the horses through her open bedroom window, the smell of new grass and honeysuckle and dew, and it didn’t matter how many board games Shawn slogged through with her or how many books Maggie read to her: she wanted to get out of that damn bed and _play._

She wanted to be in the world again. She never understood until then, and not so keenly since, how being sick locks you out of everything. How illness is a kind of solitary confinement, even if there’s no quarantine.

Unless someone busts through the door and drags you out.

_Unless someone busts through the door and you stagger out and they shoot you in the head._

She braces her hands on the porch rail and shakes herself - starts at the top of her head and ripples down to her hips. She thinks of a wet dog, seizes on it as a model with no trace of humor. She’s shaking away this new kind of fog, not shivering but dense and colorless and silent, tilting her face up to the mid-morning sun and willing the warmth to burn it away.

She has to stay out here. If she’s going to live in this world, she has to _be_ in it.

The shaking remains in her core, humming in tiny vibrations along her spinal column, and although it probably shouldn’t be, it’s bizarrely soothing. She pulls in a breath and opens her eyes, blinking, staring out at the camp as if she’s never seen it before.

Even if she hadn’t already been seeing it every time she set foot out the door, she can see it from her bedroom window. It’s possible that she’s sat up there and watched them more than once before now, observing them unseen and feeling a little guilty for it but more than open to the slightly uncomfortable pleasure unique to voyeurism of the unfamiliar. Then, a couple of days ago, that flipped on its head and suddenly it was like _they_ were all looking at _her_ , all of them all the time, whether or not she could see them. Whether or not they were there. Heard what she did, what she tried to do - of course they did, because this is the smallest of small towns and word gets instantaneously around.

Like right now. For the moment she’s alone on the porch, but Carol is down there at the edge of the camp hanging laundry, Dale saying something to Lori with his brows drawn together - which they usually seem to be - and Andrea on the roof of the RV with her rifle on her knees. Rick and Shane and Carl nowhere to be seen.

She doesn’t know these people. But she feels like she knows them far too well. Feels like they’ve seen far more of her than she ever would have wanted just about anyone to. And all at once she’s stricken by the feeling that they’re looking at her right now, out of the corner of their eyes and even through the backs of their damn _heads,_ and she’s overwhelmed by a violent wave of resentment that sends a whole new and decidedly unwelcome tremble through her bones.

Even Lori, who has been sweet to her, who clearly cares, who even when she was a pest was only a pest for the best of reasons. Screw her. She abruptly realizes that she’s gripping her wrist, nails digging into the flesh just above the edge of the bandage. Screw all of them. This is unfair, totally unreasonable, Mama wouldn’t exactly be _proud_ of her, and that’s the thought that propels her off the porch almost like she’s been kicked in the ass, her bare feet thumping on the steps and over the packed dirt and into the grass with short sharp hisses. She knows what she looks like, practically stomping along like a cranky child, can only imagine the expression on her own face. Her mouth hurts, as if it’s pulled into a severe twist. At the periphery of her vision she sees their eyes actually and for real turn to watch her - Dale, Lori, and Andrea, accusing despite her certainty that they’re merely confused - and she doesn’t care.

She doesn’t give a shit.

She’ll keep telling herself that until it’s true.

~

She has no destination in mind, but halfway there she realizes she’s headed for the hill and she almost turns around.

She doesn’t. She grits her teeth again, puts her head down and keeps on going, sure she must only be adding to the whole surly child aesthetic she has going on. The grass is still slightly damp and it plasters loose brown blades of grass to her itching feet - something she would ordinarily take more than a little pleasure in. Pretty much all her life she’s been coddled and petted in the mild and stereotypical way that the literal baby of the family often is, and it’s never unduly bothered her. She’s never felt any condescension in it. It’s historically been something she’s embraced, doing things like running barefoot through the dewy grass on a summer morning, up the hill to her favorite climbing tree. She’s wise enough to know how fast her childhood will leave her, and that she should hang onto it while she can.

Beth Greene has never been in any real hurry to grow up.

Now she wishes she had been at least a little more eager. Because if she had, she might not feel the way she is now, even having fled her imaginary and judgmental observers. As if she’s come unmoored in time, lost somewhere in the limbo between child and adult, girl and woman, undefinable and undefined. At a loss for labels or categories when it comes to herself, and therefore at a loss for understanding.

You don’t get to be a kid anymore after your own sick mother tries to tear you apart, and she’s killed before your eyes.

Except no. She halts in her tracks, staring up at the low slope of the hill, and the gold and green blurs away into a muddy smear as she bites her lip so hard she tastes copper. No, she’s being stupid. She didn’t watch Mama get _killed._ That’s not what happened.

Mama was dead. Mama had been dead for a long time. Her and Shawn both. What she saw, no matter how horrible, was things getting put right.

She wipes angrily at her eyes, releasing a sigh that empties her lungs. Sniffling and hating the sound. Little girl sound. Not because she doesn’t want to be that anymore but because she can’t be. She can never be. Another thing she was stupid about.

Maybe the world ended, sure. But what she’s discovering is only what she should have always known.

The hill. Near that tree and the ruined stone pillar of the chimney, a thin white thread of smoke rising into the flawless blue. And she sighs again, because out of literally every single one of these people, this is the man she should _least_ want to be around. Not a bad man by any stretch, or at least she’s pretty confident about that, but he’s rough and prickly, and she can imagine that his younger self was the kind of boy she’s always been told to stay away from, and besides that he’s _weird._ He strikes her as deeply unpredictable. His body and his voice speak a language just different enough from her own to make her uncomfortable.

He also keeps himself apart. She’s noticed that. He’ll be with the rest of them, working, doing what he can; whatever else he is, he’s sure as hell no slacker. If anything he seems to enjoy having a task to focus on. He seems to enjoy being useful. But at the end of it, he withdraws, even if he’s still physically among them. He pulls into himself and it’s like shades are being drawn behind his eyes, and God only knows what’s going on back there.

And this is all entirely aside from that day he got dragged unconscious into the house, filthy and bloody and reeking of death, and while the details of what happened to him were never clear to her, it was plain enough that _something_ did.

He’s strange. He’s not one of them. Or he doesn’t appear to believe he is.

So perhaps, she thinks later, that’s why she starts walking again.

~

He’s sitting on a loose stone by the glowing remains of his campfire. He doesn’t look up until she’s a few feet away from him, but by a subtle shift in his back and shoulders, the tension in his bare arms and thick, powerful hands, it’s fairly obvious that he senses her a long time before that. She’s uncertain about whether or not it’s meant as an insult - she’s not worth his notice - or whether he’s merely trying to send the message that he would rather she go away.

Well, tough. Tough shit. She’s barely said two words to him in all the time he’s been here, and he can put up with a few of them now.

Hell, he doesn’t have to talk. Neither of them does. She simply, for reasons she couldn’t hope to articulate, wants to be here.

Then he _is_ looking up at her, raising keenly narrowed eyes to her, his hands ceasing their sharp, practiced movements. His intimidatingly large knife in one hand and a stick in his other - only it’s not a _stick._ It’s far too straight and too smooth for that.

She’s seen his bow. It doesn’t take much in the way of mental gymnastics to figure out what he’s doing. But one of the elements of the manners she was raised on is the notion that if you want to indicate friendly interest in someone, you look for questions to ask them - ideally something they might find some satisfaction in talking about, some field of knowledge they’re well-versed in and can display their command of.

So what the hell. She can pretend ignorance. It’s not as if, she thinks wryly, one would look at her and find ignorance of something like this difficult to believe.

“Whatcha doin’?”

He stares at her for what seems like a long time, wordless, until the silence and the pressure of his eyes make her want to squirm. She won’t. She’ll stand her goddamn ground. She refuses to allow this _weird man_ to put her feet wrong.

At last he grunts, lowers his head, and the knife resumes its slide down the shaft of the stick.

“You’re makin’ an arrow, aren’t you?” she asks, undeterred. “For your bow?”

“Nah, I’m makin’ it to toss at shit.” His mouth twists and he doesn’t raise his head, but she catches a tiny hint of the thinly amused curl of his mouth. Not quite scorn, though not far off. “And it ain’t an arrow. ‘s a bolt.”

“Bolt, then.” She’s actually a bit proud of herself, of how the firm cheerfulness in her tone doesn’t sound as forced as it is. Could be she’s just testing her own resolve with this little exercise. “What’s the difference?”

Hands stilling once more, eyes flicking up to her as exasperation pulls at his odd features. “The hell you want, girl?”

She rolls a shoulder. “We pretty much never said anythin’ to each other since y’all got here. I figured I’d come on up, say hi.”

His exasperation is mostly overwhelmed by incredulity, and she wrestles back a smile. If she laughs at him, she’s sure, this is over. He’ll chase her away, and he might do it literally, swatting at her with the bolt and demanded that she keep her nosy ass clear.

“ _Why?_ ”

She can go for partial honesty. Probably the best policy. She shrugs again. “Ain’t got nothin’ better to do.”

Another beat of silence. Then he snorts, looks down - though he doesn’t go back to work on the bolt. “I bet you could find somethin’.”

That _does_ fall short of him explicitly telling her to scram. So she hurls caution to the breeze slipping through the leaves, sits down in the grass and crosses her legs, and looks at him.

_I don’t want to._

If he _does_ want her to scram, he _is_ going to have to make it explicit.

Then honesty stirs in her, far less partial than it was, and she pushes loose strands of hair out of her face - realizing seconds later that she used her left hand, making the bandage even more visible, and she drops it into her lap and pulls in a breath.

But it’s bothering her less than it might have.

If it was someone else.

“I wanted to get away from everyone,” she says quietly. “Been stuck in that house forever.” Pause. Then, because why not: “I hate it.”

This time when he stares at her, it’s with an expression she can’t name. Not incredulity, not exasperation, not scorn. She can’t read it at all - except that it’s not closed off. Those shades aren’t drawn.

Possibly - she could be imagining it but maybe not - a flicker of recognition.

“You could get away to anywhere,” he says, but it’s slightly - very slightly - gentler, more as if he’s pointing out a fact than arguing with her.

She shakes her head. “Daddy’d kill me if I went off on my own.”

“What about that boyfriend of yours?”

She huffs a laugh, and for a split-second she’s surprised by it and by the way a healthy dose of her own scorn is lurking in it. Almost immediately the surprise is washed over by guilt, because it’s not fair to him - because Jimmy is nice, he’s been kind to her through things that might just as easily have driven him away, _been there_ for her, been pulling his weight and doing his best, and it’s not just because he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

But he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get any of it. He looks at her and she sees worried incomprehension, and it’s only getting worse.

And he hasn’t been around her very much since It happened. She gets why. Which isn’t an excuse on his part.

“I don’t know what to say to him,” she says, even softer, and somehow she understands that she won’t need to explain it in any more detail than that.

For which she’s suddenly and profoundly grateful.

Slowly, he nods. A single acknowledging dip of his chin. And that’s when it occurs to her that since she showed up he hasn’t once, so far as she’s seen, looked at her wrist.

“So it ain’t even about me at all.” He goes back to the bolt, and though it’s as quick as a lick of flame from the coals, she’s now certain she sees a twitch of a smile, and with a small flush of surprise it comes to her that he’s teasing her. “You’re usin’ me to _get away_ to.”

“Both things can be true at once.” She sounds a little offended, doesn’t mean it and hopes he can tell. But she’ll keep going with the honesty, move it into the territory of bluntness. “Look, you want me to leave you alone, that’s fine. I’ll do that. I can just sit here and not say anythin’.”

“Yeah, ‘cause that wouldn’t be weird or nothin’.”

_Well,_ you’re _weird, so that works fine,_ she nearly blurts, and once more has to fight back a smile.

“So tell me about what you’re doin’.”

She’s expecting more resistance. But she doesn’t get any. He shrugs, turns the knife in his grip, draws it rapidly along the wood. “You asked about the difference?” He lifts it, shows it to her before setting the knife back against it. “Truth is, ain’t much of one. Lotta people call ‘em the same. Bolts’re shorter, but besides that.”

She draws her knees up against her chest, wraps her arms around them. All at once this is almost comfortable - comfortable, where before with him she never would have applied the word. “Why’re you makin’ it? Don’t you have enough?”

Knowing as she says it - knowing it _before_ she says it - that it’s a fairly silly question, but when he answers her she can detect no trace of annoyance.

“I save ‘em where I can, but not always. And they break. Don’t exactly got stores for ‘em all over the place. So ‘s a lot easier just to make ‘em.” He raises the bolt again, examines it. “Not like it’s some big chore, anyhow.”

She nods, her gaze following his hands. The more she looks at them and at what they’re doing, the more difficult it is to look away. They’re not exactly _attractive_ hands; again, they’re thick and rough, and from where she’s sitting she can see the edges of his callouses, the little white speckles of a few scars on his knuckles. But she likes them. She likes the understated strength in them, and the way the smallest movement is calculated with deep focus, side by side with the casual skill in how he handles the knife. There’s nothing in it - nothing in _him,_ not at this moment - that alarms her.

It’s strange, and possibly she shouldn’t, but at least for now, she feels safe with this man.

She doesn’t feel like she made a mistake.

“Is it relaxing?”

He gives her a half shrug, noncommittal.

“Seems like it might be.” She tears loose a couple blades of grass and rolls them between her fingers, their sandpaper edges and the damp coolness of their flesh. “Otis used to whittle and he always said it helped him think.”

A twinge through her gut; she doesn’t miss the way his practiced hands stutter, though they pick right back up as though nothing happened.

It bothers him, Otis’s death. Which plucks at something in the back of her mind. It bothered everyone, it was terrible and so terribly sad - but it _bothers_ him, and in a way she hasn’t noticed it bothering the others.

She won’t pry. Not that. Not now.

“Guess it kinda does, yeah.”

She sighs. “Honestly… I’d give a lot to _stop_ thinkin’.”

When he speaks, his tone is carefully neutral. “You doin’ a lot of that?”

“Mm. Way too much.”

And abruptly she wants to say more, so much more, tell him so many things, maybe tell him _everything:_ about the waking nightmares she sees every time she closes her eyes, about how she can’t sleep more than a few hours at a stretch without ripping herself awake with her clothes and sheets drenched in sweat, about how at night when the darkness closes in on her like a pillow over her face and pours itself into her mouth and nose like polluted water, she smells decaying flesh and feels her mother’s jagged nails clawing at her skin through her shirt.

About how she thinks she wants to live. Most of the time she knows she does. But there are moments - fewer now but they happen - where she wavers. Where it’s a choice she has to make all over again.

She’s so tired.

Something brittle snaps in her spine, and she glances down to see her fingers twisting the edge of the bandage, pulling at it as though she’d like to yank it off. Show him, perhaps. Show him the ugly slash across her wrist, shove it under his nose, and ask him what he thinks of it.

It’s going to scar, and he knows about scars. He has so many.

She lifts her gaze and settles it on him, and finally he’s looking at her. At _it,_ his brow furrowed but his expression otherwise impossible to read. And she’s positive, as confident about it as she’s ever been about anything, that when he looks at her like this, judging her for anything she’s done is about the furthest thing from his mind.

For a single awful moment she’s terrified she might lunge forward and hug him.

“You can’t be thinkin’ about shit too much,” he says softly. “You do, you won’t be able to do nothin’. Won’t be no good to no one.”

Not as if believes he’s delivering any information new to her. But reminding her of something she already knows.

Something he knows too.

Because she doesn’t just remember Shawn and Mama. That’s the worst, the most piercingly and unavoidably clear, but through the red haze of horror she remembers the little girl staggering through the doors, the way it was like a bolt of lightning stabbed down into all of them, and she remembers his face when he saw it.

She does understand why she came up here. Finally, she does.

“Yeah.” Her breath trembles on its way in, but she’s not embarrassed. There’s nothing she has to hide. “It’s like Daddy says. We all got jobs to do.”

He cocks his head. “So what’s your job, Greene?”

No longer teasing. The question is forthright and real, and she takes it in that spirit, looking down at her grass-stained fingers and turning it over in her mind like a pebble.

“I dunno,” she says at last. It’s not a very satisfactory answer, but for now it’s what she’s got. “I guess… I guess maybe my job is figurin’ that out.”

Which she can’t do if she’s dead.

After a pensive moment, he nods, and even if it’s not a satisfactory answer, it appears to satisfy him. The whisper of the knife over the wood rises into the air, and she tracks the flash of the sun off the blade’s edge until the knot eases out of her throat.

“You wanna hang up here,” he says - easily, as though it’s no big deal at all, “you can. If you want to.”

She blinks. Even if he hasn’t told her to go, this is… unexpected. “Yeah?”

He shoots her a crooked little smile. “It’s your daddy’s land. I can’t keep you off a fuckin’ inch of it, you wanna go there.”

She supposes she has to grant that logic. But she also knows a dodge when she encounters one.

Still. This can be yet another thing she doesn’t pursue. Daddy’s land or no, she’s just been extended a courtesy, and she’d guess that courtesy from this man is nothing to sneeze at.

She returns the smile, crooked as his. “Thank you kindly, Mr. Dixon.”

He rolls his eyes. But that’s all. And she stays there, sitting in the fresh grass beneath the climbing tree of her dead childhood and watching him make his bolt, the head and the bright fletching, until hunger drives her back to the house. Walking down the hill, the sun high and the last of the dew long since dried up, she thinks again of those strong, skilled hands, how it felt good to look at them, how it all felt good. Being there with him. Not having to do anything other than _be._

_Live._

~

It was the last time she went up there. Not long after that, the last remaining fragments of her world were swallowed in flames, and then they were running. Always running, sooner or later. Always fire and always running, and now, sitting here on this porch in the moonlight and watching him dig the point of his blade into the wood, she looks at his rueful little smile - crooked as it was then - and wonders how long it’ll be before everything burns and again they’re running.

Which is when she knows she doesn’t want to simply wait for it to happen. It has to be on her damn terms.

She knows she wants to live. That’s not a choice she has to make anymore. She wants it with a heat and a ferocity that scorches the walls of her mind. She still doesn’t know what she is - girl or woman - but she does know that it doesn’t matter, and it never has to him. He looked at her that day on the hill and he saw _her,_ without the filter of any label or category, and if he hurt her when he snarled at her about her wrist…

That was why.

He’s better than that. He always has been.

_We should burn it down,_ she says, and when she sees him smile again, she knows she said the right thing.

Maybe he doesn’t remember that day. More likely he does, as clearly as he recalls anything, because he forgets nothing. She won’t ask him about it, won’t seek confirmation, but as they turn their backs on the fire and melt together into the dark, she’s carrying it with her like the memory of his hands.

From that morning to this night, the path straight as the shaft of a bolt. She wasn’t aiming for this, no. But not one single step of that walk up the hill was a mistake.

She’s not sick anymore. Someday he won’t be either.


End file.
